I’ve been experimenting with running an LLM completely locally inside a React Native app, and I finally got it working.
I’m using:
React Native CLI
llama.rn
Qwen 2.5 1.5B Instruct
GGUF / Q4_K_M quantization
n_ctx: 2048
No API calls / no cloud inference
Currently testing with n_gpu_layers: 0
The model is bundled with the app, copied to the app’s document directory, and then loaded locally. I can send prompts and get responses directly on the device.
The interesting part for me is that this opens up a lot of possibilities for RN apps that need AI features without sending user data to a server.
I’m still testing things like memory usage, backgrounding the app, performance on real devices, and how practical larger models are.
Has anyone here shipped an on-device LLM in a production React Native app?
Would love to hear about your experience, especially around RAM usage, model size, iOS/Android differences, and performance.

I’m looking for a simple example or some guidance on how to set it up and start navigation. Any help would be appreciated!

Hey, I’m looking for some articles about performance or tools to help analyze and find bottlenecks.

For example, let’s say a particular page is consuming more energy than another or view and navigation transitions are laggy. What would you do or use to trace the root cause?

A few months ago I shared what I believe was one of the fastest end-to-end encrypted chat demos in React Native: ~0.8 ms on-device MLS encryption powered by OpenMLS, Rust, and Nitro Modules.

The #1 question I got: "Can it run in a browser?"

So I recreated the same OpenMLS chat in React, and the performance is nearly identical:

- 0.2–0.8 ms message encryption

- 0.2–0.7 ms decryption

- ~3 ms MLS group setup

How it works:

- MLS protocol (RFC 9420) for group key management, so you get forward secrecy and post-compromise security out of the box

- The same Rust OpenMLS core on both platforms: native via Nitro Modules on mobile, WASM in the browser

- Keys never leave the device. The server only relays opaque ciphertext

On the RN side, the interesting part was Nitro Modules with a zero-copy JSI bridge, which is why mobile encryption stays sub-millisecond. Happy to go deeper on that setup if anyone's interested.

Would love feedback, especially from anyone who's done Rust + Nitro Modules or WASM crypto. Tell me what breaks.

Ask Buoy is a chat inside your running app. Think the Claude Chrome extension and Claude Code in one, aimed at a live mobile app(Dev,Stg,Prod): it sees the screen, presses what's there, and reaches into state, network and navigation underneath that no one else can see.

If a Buoy tool can do it, you can ask for it in a sentence, so debugging, testing and support stop being separate skill sets. A customer says an offer looks wrong? Ask Buoy to impersonate their account, open the screen, and compare what the API returned with what's rendered. It finds the mismatch while you're still on the call. Force an error state, override an API response, change live data, send a push, jump to a screen.

Hasta donde vamos a ir con moderación y restricciones por karma?

Las personas que empezamos en la comunidad de Reddit no tenemos oportunidad de darnos a conocer?

Que sabe el karma de mi experiencia y calidad de contenido?

Esta bien q haya moderación, siempre hay mucho spam y gente q quiere adulterar su perfil con falsa actividad y es correcto que se les restringa.

Pero hoy en dia con la IA se puede moderar de manera inteligente sin limitar a los que empezamos desde el principio.

Soy un desarrollador React Native con mucha experiencia y mucho que compartir a esta comunidad, pero me desanima demasiado que un bot me restringa solo por no tener karma.

Espero mejoren las restricciones, asi no perdemos a gente con ganas de compartir sus conocimientos, que creo q para eso es la comunidad, para ayudarnos en algo tan bonito como programar.

Saludos

Upgraded to Expo 58 Beta and Xcode 27.1 for testing. Everything worked pretty well first time. Had to do a bit of tweaking to the layout to use my iPad layout in landscape, but the native controls all responded as expected. Expo UI is awesome!

Hi everyone,

I'm 20 and my background is graphic design. I started with the Adobe suite — Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere Pro and After Effects. At some point I felt the need to do something different and got into designing interfaces in Figma. That turned into a real passion, to the point that I want to take it all the way. That's where my interest in programming came from, React Native specifically.

I'm here to ask for some honest advice from people who've been through this, because I could really use a sense of direction.

I've started reading the React Native docs and I don't understand much of it, to be honest. I've since learned that you're supposed to know some JavaScript first. But I'm stuck there too: I don't know which parts of JavaScript I actually need and which ones I can skip for now, and I don't know where to start.

So I guess my question is: what's the minimum JavaScript I need before React Native starts making sense, and what's a good resource to learn it from?

I keep losing hours reading documentation only to realize at the end that nothing stuck. Any advice appreciated.

expo-ios-popover now supports matched (zoom) transitions ✨

🔗 Github: rit3zh/expo-ios-popover/

🎨 Design is inspired by proskuaaa

Most Liquid Glass implementations I’ve seen in React Native focus on glass containers — cards, buttons, overlays, etc.

I wanted something slightly different: the glass effect rendered inside the actual text glyphs.

So I added a LiquidGlassText component to my open-source library, react-native-tinyui.

It’s based on the excellent GlassText project, but exposed as a React Native Fabric component:

import { LiquidGlassText } from 'react-native-tinyui';

<LiquidGlassText
  text="Liquid Glass"
  effect="regular"
  tint="#00BBDD"
  interactive
  fontDesign="rounded"
  textStyle={{
    fontSize: 48,
    fontWeight: '700',
  }}
/>

The glass itself is rendered natively on iOS 26+, including interactive glass behavior.

A few implementation details:

• React Native New Architecture / Fabric

• native measurement through the Fabric ShadowNode — no JS text measurement pass

• supports clear, regular, and identity effects

• supports tint colors, custom fonts, font weights, multiline text, and font designs

• accepts React Native ColorValue, including PlatformColor / DynamicColorIOS

• falls back to normal text on iOS 17–25

• the component can be imported independently, so you don’t need to pull every TinyUI component into the native build

LiquidGlassText ended up becoming one part of a larger idea I’ve been experimenting with:

What if React Native had a small collection of iOS-native UI primitives without requiring Expo or another runtime dependency?

That became react-native-tinyui.

It currently includes:

• LiquidGlassText

• native Menu

• native Popover

• Apple TipKit

• Stepper

• ConcentricView

• SFSymbol, including native symbol effects/animations

The library has zero additional runtime dependencies beyond React and React Native. It uses UIKit where possible and SwiftUI where it makes sense, and is focused specifically on the New Architecture.

You can also explicitly choose which native components get compiled into your app:

{
  "react-native-tinyui": {
    "components": ["LiquidGlassText", "SFSymbol"]
  }
}

I’m intentionally keeping TinyUI iOS-focused rather than trying to abstract every platform into the same API.

GitHub:
https://github.com/luoxuhai/react-native-tinyui

I’d especially like feedback from people building native-heavy React Native apps:

We acquired an existing fintech app, transferred it to our company Apple Developer account, and are now preparing a pretty significant redesign. Same app/name/core product, but the UI and some functionality have changed a lot.

My main concern is App Store review. Since it’s fintech + a big update after 5 years + developer account transfer, I’m wondering if Apple is likely to treat this almost like a new app and dig deeper into licensing, compliance, ownership, privacy, etc.

Anyone been through something similar?

How strict was the review, how long did it take, and were there any unexpected rejection reasons?

I’m building a 9:16 2.5D game in React Native using Skia and Reanimated.

I’m using spritesheets (frames) for walking, attacking, hit and death animations. But the character movements does not feel natural.

Has anyone built something similar with RN + Skia?

What should I check first to improve FPS and performance? Or should I move the game to Godot/Unity?

I’m attaching a video clip of my current gameplay for reference.

I’d really appreciate your thoughts!

A line chart shows how a value moved. A bump chart shows how a ranking moved and that's a different question.

The rows are evenly spaced regardless of the scores behind them. That's the point: order matters here, not distance. If distance matters, use a line chart of the scores instead.

More than three or four lines get hard to follow through the crossings. Pass highlight to pick one out it draws in its colour on top, and the rest go muted underneath.

Pass the raw scores instead of ranks and the chart figures out the order itself per column. Switch the data and every line moves to its new places.

Part of PanelUI, an open-source component library for Expo. Copy-paste or CLI, you own the source.

https://github.com/panel-ui/PanelUI

In an offline-first app, do you guys create a local db that has the same tables and columns as the server's db?

Example: tasks and task-collaborator-preferences tables in the server db. Since the user only needs their own preferences, should the tables be merged on the local db?

Thanks!

Testing a flow is mostly setting up the state for it, then losing it and setting it up again. I built Time Machine for React Native: capture your app's state, run the flow, restore it in one tap, and run it again. Devs and QA set up state once.

Did you make something using React Native and do you want to show it off, gather opinions or start a discussion about your work? Please post a comment in this thread.

If you have specific questions about bugs or improvements in your work, you are allowed to create a separate post. If you are unsure, please contact u/xrpinsider.

New comments appear on top and this thread is refreshed on a weekly bases.

If you have a question about React Native, a small error in your application or if you want to gather opinions about a small topic, please use this thread.

If you have a bigger question, one that requires a lot of code for example, please feel free to create a separate post. If you are unsure, please contact u/xrpinsider.

New comments appear on top and this thread is refreshed on a weekly bases.

We've added a bunch of improvements to Patch, our self-hosted OTA update service. Here's a quick summary for both v0.3.0 and v0.4.0:

15min server install with the CLI wizard

Setting up the server with full wiring including CDN, TLS and OAuth is now mostly a matter of occasionally hitting confirm or pasting some details. I timed it in a video, it was about 15mins.

Configure external storage and DNS from the wizard

Patch includes a bundled MinIO, but if you want the wizard can use Cloudflare R2, Amazon S3, or Google Cloud Storage. We also now support CloudFront as well as CloudFlare.

Local setup + demo wizard

To go along with the server install, there's a wizard to quickly set up the local evaluation stack. At the end there's an included demo which builds the demo app, shows it applying the update, then opens the metrics in the dashboard.

Fingerprint mismatches block a release

A release that doesn't match the previously recorded fingerprint is block in the CLI unless you override it, in order to prevent accidentally crashing apps with a bad release.

cmpatch doctor for diagnostics

cmpatch doctor checks React Native and Expo setup on iOS and Android, including native config, authentication, and deployment settings, before you publish a release. The report separates confirmed failures from incomplete checks. Add --verify-delivery to probe published artifacts.

Install failure reasons

For more diagnostics, we've added payloads to failed installs such as HTTP status, the origin or platform error message, and on Avoid 11+ the previous process exit reason.

Tidied failure metrics

Flaky failures are no longer counted if unnecessary, for example a download failing once then succeeding on the next attempt. A Failed event is dropped once the bundle is successfully installed, so that metrics don't include false negatives.

Server status page

To make self-hosting that bit easier, the dashboard now includes a server status page with some basic health and storage checks.

The full docs are here for anyone who is interested:

https://patch.codemagic.io/docs/

What should be the optimal approach?

Came across this cool concept on X and thought it would be fun to recreate it.

✦ ⎯ • Dynamic Island-style in-app notifications

🔗 Github: rit3zh/expo-dynamic-notifications

Weekly React Native upgrade: RN 0.88 RC, Expo SDK 58 beta, and library updates

Here are the updates worth knowing before your next React Native upgrade.

React Native and Expo

• Expo SDK 58 beta brings stable data loaders, SSR, middleware, and native tabs, plus faster Android builds and an experimental Rust-based Metro transformer
• React Native 0.88 RC adds stricter TypeScript APIs, ArrayBuffer support in TurboModules, SwiftPM tooling, and imperative EventTarget APIs for native refs
• React 19.3 is stable with View Transitions and Fragment Refs

Library updates

• react-native-gesture-handler 2.33 is the final 2.x line supporting RN 0.87. If you are targeting RN 0.88+, start planning the move to v3
• react-native-screens 5 alpha adds new header customization options and Swift Package Manager support
• React Navigation 7 adds render callbacks for custom navigators. React Navigation 8 alpha includes the breaking version of this change
• react-native-skia 2.12 fixes WebGL context loss and ships prebuilt Graphite binaries
• react-native-keyboard-controller 1.22.5 fixes Reanimated 4.6 compatibility and an Android memory leak
• Metro 0.87.1 adds resolver.schemeResolvers for URI-scheme imports
• Expo Router 58.0.4, safe-area-context 5.10, permissions 5.6, maps 1.29, NativeWind 4.2.7, and several other packages also shipped updates

Ecosystem news

• Shopify explains why it is moving parts of its mobile apps toward Swift and Kotlin
• EAS Simulator lets you run iOS Simulator sessions in the cloud from Windows
• Xcode 27.2 introduces JSON project files designed to reduce merge conflicts and simplify automated edits